Health Reference tableQC clean AI-training-safe

US Food Nutrition Composition

Every food in USDA's authoritative composition databases with the amount of every nutrient it contains, in one clean long table - the join nobody wants to do by hand. FoodData Central ships this as five separate CSVs (food, food_nutrient, nutrient, food_category and a per-type NDB crosswalk); we assemble and de-duplicate them into one tidy (food × nutrient) Parquet. Covers the three pure-USDA bundles - Foundation Foods (analytically measured reference foods), SR Legacy (the classic ~7.8k-food Standard Reference that underpins US nutrition analysis) and FNDDS (the 'as consumed' survey foods people actually report eating) - with energy, macronutrients, vitamins, minerals, amino acids and fatty acids, each with its unit and amount per 100 g. A data_type column preserves the measured-vs-survey distinction so you can filter either way. Keyed by FDC id with the legacy NDB number carried through, so it joins to recipe, dietary-intake and agricultural data. Public domain (U.S. Government work).

1M
rows
9
columns
6.2 MB
download
Source
USDA FDC
Licence
Redistributable open data
Quality
QC clean · 0 failures
Format
Apache Parquet + dictionary

Safe to train on

Built only from a named, redistributable official source under a documented open licence - not scraped web data. No copyright grey zone, no personal data. Ships machine-readable Croissant metadata (ML Commons - loads in Hugging Face / Kaggle / Google), an AI training-licence manifest documenting source, licence and provenance for your model's data governance, and a machine-readable data dictionary (drop it into an agent / RAG prompt so the model knows every column) - all inspectable before you buy.

What's included

  • One row per (food × nutrient) - the full nutrient panel for every food, tidy long shape
  • Foundation + SR Legacy + FNDDS (15k+ foods): energy, macros, vitamins, minerals, amino & fatty acids
  • data_type flags measured (foundation/sr_legacy) vs 'as consumed' survey (survey_fndds_food) foods
  • Amount per 100 g with the nutrient's unit; nutrient rank for canonical ordering
  • Keyed by FDC id; legacy NDB number carried through for joins to older nutrition datasets
  • The multi-CSV join (food ⋈ food_nutrient ⋈ nutrient ⋈ category ⋈ NDB) done once, cleanly
  • Branded foods deliberately excluded (manufacturer-label provenance) - pure USDA data only
  • Public domain (USDA FoodData Central) - food-composition facts only, no personal data
  • Source: U.S. Department of Agriculture, FoodData Central (public domain)

Schema

ColumnTypeDescriptionFilledDistinct
fdc_id int FoodData Central food id (primary key with nutrient) 100.0% 13,611
ndb_number str Legacy NDB / Standard-Reference number (where assigned) 64.6% 7,924
description str Food name / description 100.0% 13,374
food_category str USDA food category (or WWEIA survey category for FNDDS foods) 100.0% 196
data_type str Source bundle: foundation_food, sr_legacy_food or survey_fndds_food 100.0% 3
nutrient str Nutrient name (e.g. Protein, Energy, Calcium, Ca) 100.0% 245
nutrient_unit str Unit of the amount (G, MG, UG, KCAL, …) 100.0% 7
amount float Amount of the nutrient per 100 g of edible portion 100.0% 24,223
nutrient_rank float USDA display/sort rank for the nutrient 100.0% 239

Sample & preview

Every purchase ships as Apache Parquet with a data dictionary and the full QC report. A free sample (first rows + schema) is downloadable here - confirm fit before you buy. Source: USDA FDC (redistributable open data; attribution passes through - see our Licence).

Don't trust screenshots - drop the sample into your notebook right now.

import pandas as pd
df = pd.read_parquet("us-food-nutrition-composition_sample.parquet")
df.info()   # typed columns, gap-aware, ready to join
⬇ Download free Parquet sample or CSV for Excel